Aiden Gillen meets a fellow of infinite jest, presumably.Image: History

In Project Blue Book, Game of Thrones’ Aiden Gillen plays a skeptical investigator of all things alien. But as this first trailer for the Hstory Channel’s new drama series shows, it turns out that deep down, he wants to believe.

This morning Entertainment Weekly debuted the first full look at Project Blue Book, produced by Back to the Future’s Robert Zemeckis. Loosely inspired by declassified documents from the U.S. government, the ‘50s-set drama stars Gillen as J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer recruited by the U.S. Air Force to investigate sightings of extraterrestrial life all over America. Although Hynek and his assigned partner Captain Michael Quinn (Michael Malarkey) start out skeptical and want to confirm that little green men from space aren’t real, the duo quickly find that their employers are hiding something big from both them and the American people at large.

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Oh, and there’s totally a little green man from space in a tube at the end. Twist!

That said, showrunner Sean Jablonski warned EW despite the presence of a literal alien in a tank, Project Blue Book will lean more towards its conspiracy thriller side rather than the ‘50s retro scifi of UFOs and aliens hidden among us:

This is not a little green men show. This is more of a government conspiracy show with a great sci-fi twist — and also a character piece. Everything we see is and is not what it is. We’re not gonna take the position, certainly not early on, that little green men are running around and it’s just a question of finding them. The creature that you see in that tank is to them what they think it is, and yet it’s not.

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Shame, really. A period X-Files sort of thing could be really neat—but even if Project Blue Book focuses on conspiracies instead of straight-up aliens, so far it’s looking pretty interesting. The series is set to launch on the History Channel this winter, but we’ll presumably learn more at its Comic-Con panel this Saturday, July 21.